THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

A group of Cubans, said to be vulnerable, have reportedly been
flown from Costa Rica to northern Mexico where they are expected to
cross the border into the United States. They will then apply for an
immigration status adjustment as Cuban refugees.

113 Cuban immigrants, including pregnant women and children, were
flown by the government of Costa Rica to Nuevo Laredo on Tuesdday, the
BBC reported.

Breitbart Texas’ Lana Shadwick reported
on Sunday that a surge of Cuban illegal immigrants were crossing the
border from Mexico into Texas after a long journey from Ecuador. “These
Cubans use Ecuador as a gateway to travel to the United States,”
Shadwick reported. “It is the only country in Latin America that allows
Cubans to enter without a Visa.”
This new group of Cubans were stranded in Costa Rica after Nicaragua
sealed its border and refused to allow them passage on their journey to
Mexico.
It appears the new surge of Cubans attempting to cross the Texas
border with Mexico is a direct result of the establishment of diplomatic
relations between Cuba and the United States by President Barack Obama
late last year. The new policy sparked fears that the long established
policy of automatic status adjustment from illegal immigrant to
permanent resident might be dropped, the BBC reported.
It appears this is the latest of several flights from Costa Rica to
northern Mexico. Faced with a growing number of Cuban refugees being
stranded in Costa Rica, the government and other Central American
countries reached an agreement to help move the migrants northward to
the U.S. border. The program from Costa Rica began in January, the BBC
said.
Shadwick reported that Ecuador is no longer allowing Cubans to fly
from their home country to Ecuador. They are asking the U.S. to
reconsider its automatic asylum laws. Cubans must now get permission
from Ecuador to travel to that country.
There are now approximately 7,000 Cubans trapped in a bottleneck
trying to get to the U.S., Professor Arturo Lopez Levy from the
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley told local reporters. He expects
the number to slow down by April or May.Bob Price is a senior political news contributor for Breitbart
Texas and a member of the original Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on
Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.

Donald Trump: More Criminal Illegal Aliens at Large in U.S. than Population of any City in New Hampshire

At Monday’s rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, GOP frontrunner
Donald Trump addressed the impact illegal immigration has had on
criminality throughout American communities and warned that there are
more criminal aliens at-large in the U.S. than the population of any
city in New Hampshire.

Trump told his Manchester audience:

Right now, as we speak … we have 179,000 illegal criminal
immigrants — illegal criminal — these are people that have been
convicted of crimes, some very big crimes. That means that we have
179,000 people here that have committed crimes that shouldn’t be crimes —
that shouldn’t be in the country … 179,000 people is bigger than any
city, by a lot, in New Hampshire. That’s a massive amount of people.

Indeed, a report
issued last week from the Senate Immigration Subcommittee found that
“fugitive criminal aliens outnumber populations of all New Hampshire
cities.”

For instance, the report notes that New Hampshire’s largest city,
Manchester — where Trump’s rally was held tonight — has a population
of around 110,000: “The number of at-large criminal aliens ordered
removed dwarfs the population [of Manchester] by nearly 70,000.”
The report states:

There are at least 179,027 aliens in the United States
who not only have been ordered to leave the country for violating our
immigration laws, but who have also been convicted of a criminal
offense, and have not left as required or been removed by ICE … While
the ICE data includes only criminal aliens who have already been ordered
removed, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for
Immigration Studies, estimates there are more than 2 million total criminal aliens in the United States.

Trump continued, explaining to his New Hampshire audience:

We either have a country, folks, or we don’t. Remember
this: we either have a country or we don’t. So we’re going to have to
take people, we’re going to get rid of those 179 [thousand]. And I don’t
want to put them in our jails… Our jails are costing us a fortune…
We’re bringing them back where they came from, and let that country put
them in prison for the next 25 years, because we’re not doing it. And
they’re never, ever coming back to our country again. They are gone.
Never.”

In contrast to Trump’s pledge to deport those residing in the country illegally,

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

79%

co-authored and championed an immigration bill, which, according to
immigration law enforcement, would “provide instant legalization and a
path to citizenship to gang members and other dangerous criminal
aliens.”
At the time, ICE Union president Chris Crane said that Rubio
“directly misled law enforcement.” As Stephen Miller — Trump’s Senior
Policy Adviser and former communications director for

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

80%

— recently told Breitbart News Daily, Rubio watched on
as Chuck Schumer allowed Capitol Hill security to remove Crane from the
Gang of Eight press conference. Miller said that Crane was removed
simply “for having the temerity to ask a question” on behalf of law
enforcement after Rubio had broken his promises.
Breitbart News has previously reported how Rubio continues
to support all of the substantive policies outlined in his Gang of Eight
bill — including the controversial aspect of the bill
which would have allowed convicted criminal aliens, such as sex
offenders and gang members, to remain in the United States and become
U.S. citizens.

"Criminal Aliens" Flashpoint of Border Security Debate

A group of undocumented Mexican national
ex-offenders enter Mexico at the US-Mexico border crossing at
Brownsville/Matamoros after being deported from the United States on
Nov. 4, 2015.

The
Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border
security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around
these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.

Juan Francisco de Luna Vasquez passed through the Webb County jail at
least four times on more than a half dozen charges before allegedly
beating his wife to death with a hammer last year in Laredo.Victor Reyes had already spent three months in the Hidalgo County Jail, four
months in state custody and six years in federal prison for multiple
felony offenses by the time he went on a random shooting spree in
Houston, killing two people and injuring three more in January 2015.
And before Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly shot Kate Steinle
to death on Pier 14 in San Francisco last summer, authorities say he had
racked up a criminal record including seven felonies, mostly drug
related, and a 1997 arrest for assault.
There are peculiarities to each case, but they have something in
common: all three men were thrown out of the country multiple times by
federal immigration authorities but returned illegally — through the
Texas-Mexico border — before committing new crimes in the United States,
records obtained by The Texas Tribune show.
Their crimes put them at the center of a red-hot political debate
about illegal immigration, the revolving door at the southern border and
controversial immigrant catch-and-release policies that pit
deportation-fixated conservatives against liberal immigrant advocates.
How to deal with, or talk about, foreigners who commit crimes in the
United States — the government’s term for them is the politically
incorrect “criminal aliens” — has laid bare a bitter divide in the
electorate and has prompted heated calls for vastly different solutions.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that undocumented immigrants make up a
smaller share of those imprisoned in Texas — including on Death Row —
than of the general population. However, a veil of government secrecy
and inconsistent record-keeping make it difficult to accurately
determine how many criminal immigrants are in the country or how many
crimes they have committed. Fear, outrage and political jockeying have
largely filled the information void.

“This
is an issue that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work
on it because we're so busy pointing fingers at each other.”— Sarah Saldaña, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Billionaire Donald Trump kicked off his smash-talking presidential
campaign last year with criminal immigrants in his crosshairs, saying
Mexico was sending its “rapists” and drug dealers to the United States and promising to build a gigantic border wall to keep them out.
Closer to home, liberal activists in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas are pressuring
local law enforcement officials to build a different kind of wall —
procedural barricades to block local officials from cooperating and
coordinating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove
people.
Their concern: In the rush to deport unwanted criminals from the
ranks of the undocumented, a lot of otherwise hard-working and
law-abiding foreign nationals are caught up in the dragnet — people like
Raul Zamora, a
University of Texas student who found himself facing removal after
getting pulled over for a broken tail-light. Or Max Villaroto, a popular
Iowa pastor deported last summer
for minor crimes (DWI and using fraudulent documents) committed in the
late 1990s. Civil liberties organizations also argue that federal
authorities are violating the constitutional rights of some inmates, and
in some cases those groups have successfully sued jails that hand inmates over to federal authorities.
No one is more aware of the schizophrenic impulses in immigration
policy than Sarah Saldaña, the Texas-born director of ICE, which has a
$6 billion budget and 20,000 employees spread across all 50 states and
several dozen foreign countries. Many Democrats think she’s “heartless”
when it comes to deporting and detaining immigrants, as one Democratic
Congressional aide put it. Republicans think she’s not tough enough.
“What we're doing now is not satisfying to anybody — the left or the
right,” Saldaña told The Texas Tribune in December. “This is an issue
that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work on it because
we're so busy pointing fingers at each other."Slipping through the cracks
The political focus on criminal immigrants flows directly from
official U.S. policy: Terrorists and public safety threats are the top
priorities of the nation’s border security and immigration enforcement
apparatus. President Obama famously said
in 2014 that he wants to deport “felons, not families.” ICE insists it
focuses on removing the “worst of the worst.” Even immigration
hard-liners who say they want to deport everyone here illegally agree
the bad guys should go first.
The problem is that criminals take advantage of the same porous
border as otherwise law-abiding job seekers. And if they are apprehended
in this country, sometimes they are set free by ICE or an immigration
judge. Other times, they slip through the cracks of systematic
communication breakdowns among local, state and federal law enforcement.
Some of them end up committing more crimes.
In the late 1990s, infamous “railway killer”
Rafael Resendez-Ramirez took advantage of the leaky border and law
enforcement failures to repeatedly elude authorities, often using fake
names, even though he was wanted by the FBI, was a suspect in several
murders and had criminal records in at least seven states.
A damning federal report in 2000 highlighted poor training and interbureaucratic fumbling
behind the decision giving Resendez a “voluntary return” to his native
Mexico, for the eighth time, in the summer of 1999. He came back to the
United States almost immediately and killed four more people over two
weeks.

photo by: Justin Dehn

Juan Leonardo Quintero, an undocumented
immigrant pictured here in 2015 in a visitation booth at the
maximum-security Allred Unit near Wichita Falls, is serving a life
sentence for the 2006 murder of Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson.

Fallout from the case helped prompt reforms and better sharing of
criminal databases among law enforcement agencies, but weaknesses
endured. That became clear a few months after Resendez was put to death
by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, in 2006, when Juan Leonardo
Quintero, a deported sex offender with multiple previous criminal
convictions, shot and killed Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson in
the back of his patrol car.
His case, like Resendez’s, sparked a series of reforms. The Texas
Department of Public Safety had removed Quintero and more than 2,000
other sex offenders from its public registry, though not from the
criminal database law enforcement uses internally, after they were
deported — despite the possibility of their return to Texas. That
practice stopped after Johnson’s murder.After the high-profile murder, the
city of Houston also changed its policy to allow more police cooperation
with ICE to ensure that wanted criminal immigrants are handed over to
federal authorities, recalls Robert Rutt, the agency’s special agent in
charge at the time of the incident.
“It took the tragedy of Rodney Johnson being killed,” Rutt said.Sanctuary cities
In spite of piecemeal reforms over the years at the federal and local
level, significant lapses remain — and seemingly avoidable tragedies
pile up.
Kate Steinle was shot dead in San Francisco just weeks after her
alleged murderer was released from jail by local authorities who
rebuffed a request from federal immigration authorities to notify them
before his release.
San Francisco is among so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit or, in
some cases, forbid local police and jailers from cooperating with ICE
to catch and detain immigrants sought by the agency.
In the Steinle case, the agency wanted to take custody of
undocumented immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez after authorities in
San Francisco apprehended and processed him on an outstanding warrant.
But under its policy
of noncooperation with federal authorities on immigration matters, the
jail released him without notifying ICE. Officials in California said if
the agency wanted Lopez-Sanchez, it could have used its power to seek a
court order to hold him.
Several years earlier in Chicago, similar “sanctuary” policies allowed Kenyan-born gang leader Mwenda Murithi to stay off ICE’s radar
despite 26 arrests and four felony convictions. After he got out of
jail in 2007, Murithi ordered a gang hit that led to the death of a
13-year-old girl who was caught in the crossfire. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison.
This deliberate disconnect between local authorities and ICE — a
chief reason certain local jurisdictions get the “sanctuary city” label —
ranks as one of the major ways
immigrants slip through the hands of law enforcement, according to
agency data obtained by The Texas Tribune under the Freedom of
Information Act.
The federal records show local law enforcement agencies around
the country declined to honor more than 18,000 “detainer” requests from
ICE — a process used when the agency seeks custody of non-citizens in
local or state jails — from Jan. 1, 2014 to September of last year.
Two-thirds of them had criminal records, the records show.

Generally speaking, when local officials don't honor a detainer, a
foreign national wanted by federal authorities is released from a jail
after an arrest or conviction. Some later get picked up by ICE for
possible deportation. Some don’t.
Almost 60 percent of the refused detainers nationwide were logged in California. According to an internal ICE memo,
obtained last year by the conservative Center for Immigration Studies,
which vigorously opposes illegal immigration, 27 percent of the declined
detainers in the first eight months of 2014 were associated with
individuals who, soon after getting out of jail, allegedly went on to
commit new crimes.
Most of the details of those alleged crimes were deemed confidential,
and that part of the memo was blacked out. Not redacted: six incidents
of recidivism that the agency considered “particularly high profile”
over the eight-month period — five in California and one in Florida.
Among the foreign nationals in California who were let go and quickly
got in trouble again: a sex offender in San Mateo County with a prior
DUI who allegedly went on to sexually assault a victim under the age of
10; a Santa Clara County resident with “nine previous convictions
(including seven felonies);” and a robbery suspect who got out of jail
and was soon arrested on a rape charge.
Then there was this description in the ICE report: “On April 6, 2014,
Los Angeles, California law enforcement arrested an individual for
felony continuous sexual abuse of a child. Despite the severity of that
charge, local law enforcement did not honor an immigration detainer ICE
issued for the individual. After local law enforcement declined the
detainer, the individual was arrested for felony sodomy of a victim
under 10 years old.”
Texas accounts for a miniscule fraction of the declined detainers —
less than one percent— making it the most ICE-friendly large state in
the country. But Dallas and Travis Counties have “come onto the radar”
of ICE officials due to the pressure that activists are exerting on
officials there, agency Director Saldaña recently told the Tribune.

Dallas — which has been sued at least twice over its cooperation with
federal authorities — is the only county in Texas listed by ICE as
having a policy that limits cooperation with the agency, though the
sheriff’s office there says it has yet to decline a detainer request.
One reason Dallas County has been taken to court is the allegation that
it honored a federal detainer that ICE placed, in violation of the
Constitution, on a U.S. citizen.
Travis County, a rare Democratic stronghold in an otherwise red
state, logged half of the rejected detainers in Texas, with 72, between
Jan. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2015, according to the data obtained by the
Tribune.
The way some outspoken activists and elected officials see it, that
number should be far higher. All four of the candidates in the March 1
Democratic primary to replace outgoing Travis County Sheriff Greg
Hamilton — a Democrat who works closely with ICE despite immense
pressure to stop — want to end cooperation
with the agency when it issues detainers for non-citizen inmates. The
Travis County Democratic Party and Austin City Council have also gone on
record in the last couple of years calling for a break-up in the
local-federal marriage.
“There’s a very good chance that our next sheriff may very well
disentangle our relationship between local law enforcement and
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” said Austin City Councilman
Gregorio Casar. “I don’t think we should be complying (with ICE
detainers).”
Casar rejects the notion that telling ICE to take a hike amounts to
being “soft on the law.” Instead, he said families will feel safe — and
more inclined to cooperate with the police — if they know they don’t
risk deportation when they get in trouble locally.
Representing a heavily immigrant district — he’s the son of Mexican
immigrants himself — Casar said conservative politicians use anecdotal
evidence of crimes committed by immigrants to tar an entire population,
“using xenophobia or fear or stereotyping of others as a way to move
somebody’s political agenda forward.”
His argument points to another major flashpoint in the debate about
immigrants who commit crimes — namely, how to measure the problem.
Liberals and conservatives generally point to statistics that bolster
their particular ideological views, yet virtually every data set
contains flaws and caveats. Hiding the numbers
Woefully incomplete record-keeping and intentional secrecy top the
list of reasons why it's difficult to measure crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants. During booking, local jails — in Texas and
beyond — often don’t ask who’s a citizen and who isn’t. They’re supposed
to determine whether an inmate is “foreign born,” but since that
designation can include people here legally — everyone from agricultural
guest workers to naturalized U.S. citizens — the data generally can’t
be used to track crimes by those here illegally.
On the federal side, the institutional secrecy inside ICE makes it
difficult to obtain or analyze how the government is handling
undocumented criminal offenders — or, for that matter, whether
non-criminal immigrants are being treated fairly in detention. Although
the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was written only to protect citizens and
lawful U.S. residents, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE by
extension have adopted rules applying it to undocumented immigrants,
including those with criminal records. In practice, ICE provides
detailed immigration histories of “criminal aliens” only when it chooses
to — as it often does after high-profile cases that spark local
outrage.
For example, the agency quickly provided the extensive immigration
history of Steinle’s alleged murderer after the fact, as it did in 2011
when Kevin Will became the fourth
Houston police officer since 2005 to be killed or seriously injured by
an undocumented immigrant previously removed from the United States. But
ICE cites Privacy Act protections when citizens or the news media asks
for lists of, say, multiple deportees with criminal records who have
been released into a particular community — information that might point
to a fixable glitch or policy shortcoming.
A federal judge on the East Coast triggered a rare burst of transparency
from the secretive agency when she ruled in 2013 that ICE had to
provide the names of thousands of violent offenders to the Boston Globe
after a two-year legal battle. But today the agency considers that a
one-off decision that applied only to the Globe’s request and has thus
far refused to give the Tribune or other news outlets identifying
information about any significant slice of the immigrant population it
detains, deports or releases — including those with violent histories.
ICE even turned down the Tribune’s request for the immigration
histories of nine of the state’s 12 undocumented death row inmates. The
agency voluntarily provided the information on three of them, but its
Freedom of Information Act Office said it would need the other condemned
prisoners to agree in writing before giving out details of their
encounters with the U.S. Border Patrol or ICE, including any
deportations.
“Please be advised that DHS regulations require, in the case of third
party information requests, a statement from the individual verifying
his or her identity and certifying that individual's agreement that
records concerning him or her may be accessed, analyzed and released to a
third party,” ICE said in an email to the Tribune.
ICE officials did help identify the 12 inmates currently on Texas
death row who were here illegally at the time they committed their
crimes. That made it possible to determine whether undocumented
immigrants are under- or over-represented. They make up about 4.7
percent of those awaiting execution — less than the 6.3 percent of the
Texas population believed to be undocumented.

“I see more local U.S. citizens coming through the revolving door than I do immigrants.”— Ponce Coy Trevino, commander of the Webb County Jail in Laredo

Similarly, The Texas Tribune analyzed Texas prison data and found no
evidence to suggest that undocumented immigrants are convicted of state
crimes at higher rates than the native-born. In fact, inside the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice, the Tribune estimates that undocumented
immigrants known to be wanted by ICE make up about 4.6 percent of the
total inmate population. As with the death row figures, the evidence
suggests that people here illegally at the time they committed crimes
are under-represented in state prison when compared to the total number
of undocumented immigrants believed to be living in Texas.
County jail data in Texas is harder to analyze, but anecdotally, a
similar picture emerges — even along the southern border that so many
immigrants cross.
“I see more local U.S. citizens coming through the revolving door
than I do immigrants,” said Ponce Coy Trevino, commander of the Webb
County Jail in Laredo, which sits right on the Texas-Mexico border.
“Every once in a while ... I’ll see a certain person and think, ‘Hey,
didn’t he get deported?’ And he comes back in. But I see more of the
local U.S. citizens.”
No matter what the rate, many in Congress say crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be happening at all, particularly when
perpetrated by people with long criminal records who have been deported
multiple times — the “worst of the worst” that ICE considers to be its
top priorities for removal.
“The saddest thing is it’s preventable,” said U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul,
R-Austin, a former federal prosecutor who oversees much of the federal
immigration and border enforcement activity as chairman of the U.S.
House Homeland Security Committee. “If [local law enforcement] would
honor the ICE detainer, if we could get that border secure, we could
stop this.”Federal detainees also released
Sanctuary city policies — whether intentional or prompted by lawsuits
— are not the only way immigrants with criminal histories get out of
law enforcement custody. While ICE chafes when county jails release
immigrant criminals onto the streets, some sheriffs point out that the
federal agency itself lets thousands go, too. This often happens without
ICE telling local authorities when or where it’s happening, though the
agency says it’s beefing up efforts to notify states when criminals are
released in various jurisdictions.
Over the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, ICE released 66,565 “criminal
aliens” from its custody, according to agency figures. A state-by-state
breakdown provided to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee shows
that 11,219 of them were released in Texas.
Sometimes, they offend again. According to ICE figures provided to
the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1,000 of the immigrants released from
federal custody in 2013 were convicted
of later crimes, and 121 immigrants let go during removal proceedings
between 2010 and 2014 were subsequently charged with homicide-related
offenses.
There are three main routes out the door of federal immigration detention.
In many cases, ICE uses its own discretion to release immigrants with
criminal histories — as it did 57 percent of the time in fiscal 2014.
Some are supervised or monitored, and some are not. The releases have
sparked blowback in Congress, and last March the agency announced tighter
procedures for non-mandatory releases, particularly for violent
offenders. In December, Saldaña said discretionary releases have gone
down in 2015, but the agency has yet to release the figures.
In other cases, ICE has no choice but to release a detained foreign
national if ordered to by an immigration judge from the U.S. Department
of Justice. In 2014, 35 percent of those released fell into this
category.
Then there’s the so-called “Zadvydas” releases, which
accounted for eight percent of the total releases in fiscal 2014,
figures provided to Congress show. Those occur when immigrants can’t be
deported, typically because their home country refuses to take them back
or there’s a problem processing travel documents.
The name comes from U.S. Supreme Court case Zadvydas v. Davis, a 5-4 decision that
ICE can’t hold a noncitizen criminal indefinitely; unless deportation
is reasonably imminent, the cutoff is six months. Since the ruling came
out in 2001, thousands of criminally convicted immigrants with final
removal orders — about 6,000 in the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years alone —
have been let go. This was the category of release the Boston Globe,
which only got detailed information after suing the agency, wrote about
in 2012. Globe reporter Maria Sacchetti described several chilling
crimes by un-deportable foreigners and reported that ICE “routinely
releases dangerous detainees to the streets of America without warning
the public.”
Both Republican and Democratic administrations have repeatedly ignored or otherwise failed to use the considerable power
Congress gave the executive branch to pressure foreign governments by
denying U.S. visas to their citizens. Years after the landmark Boston
Globe report came out, there remains just a single instance in which it
was used — when the tiny South American nation of Guyana refused to take
back convicts, officials say. (Cuba, China, Vietnam and India are among
the habitual decliners, according to ICE figures and congressional
testimony).
A 2004 audit
by the Government Accountability Office noted that two months after the
United States suspended visas to citizens of Guyana in 2001, the country
“issued travel documents to 112 of the 113 Guyanese aliens who had been
order removed from the United States.” Auditors also found overwhelmed
ICE officials were failing to oversee released immigrants they were
supposed to be keeping an eye on.
U.S. Rep. John Culberson,
R-Houston, said the U.S. government should have done the same thing it
did to Guyana when another tiny country — Haiti — refused to take back
convicted immigrant Jean Jacques, a Haitian convict who was released
under the Zadvydas ruling and now stands accused of murder in the 2015 stabbing death of Casey Chadwick in Connecticut.
“If someone is in the country illegally, and we try to send them back
to their home country, and their home country refuses it, we not only
ought to cut off visas to their government officials, but frankly cut
off foreign aid, cut off economic assistance,” Culberson said.Gridlock blocks reform
If Culberson's insistence sounds like a partisan screed from a conservative Texas Republican (and a supporter of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz,
an immigration hard-liner, for president), consider this: Democratic
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Hillary Clinton supporter, said as much
to Saldaña, Obama’s ICE director, at a contentious December Senate
hearing focusing on the administration’s “criminal alien removal
policies.”

photo by: Allison Shelley

Sarah R. Saldaña, director of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at ICE headquarters in Washington,
D.C., on Dec. 9, 2015.

Yet, despite evidence of bipartisan agreement on punishing foreign
countries that don’t take their nationals back — an effort that in 2012
briefly brought together the likes of conservative U.S. Rep. Ted Poe,
R-Humble, and liberal California U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren — proposals to
curtail the practice have stalled out like so many other immigration and
border security fixes.
Cruz used the same recent Senate hearing to promote his own vision
for solving the problem of repeat border-crossers who commit crimes: a
mandatory minimum sentence of five years for anyone caught re-entering
the country illegally after deportation, a bill supporters call “Kate’s
Law,” in memory of Kate Steinle.
Saldaña pointed to prison overcrowding, which recently prompted one of the largest releases of federal inmates in U.S. history, in expressing opposition to the measure, which Senate Democrats ended up blocking.
“Last time I checked, there was very close to a majority of illegal
aliens in our current prisons, and I think you are very much aware of
the state of our current prisons and the fact that they’re busting at
the seams,” Saldaña told Cruz. “I do not believe that increasing the
minimum penalty is going to be the most effective thing.”
ICE officials were unable to say what statistics Saldaña was
referencing. Noncitizens — not necessarily undocumented ones — make up
about a quarter, not half, of the federal prison population, says
the U.S. Sentencing Commission. When it comes to federal arrests,
noncitizens made up just under half of the total in 2010, largely due to
an explosion of prosecutions for illegal entry, rather than for violent
acts, according to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service.
During the hearing and later, in an interview with the Tribune,
Saldaña, a Corpus Christi native and sister of Nueces County State
District Judge Marisela Saldaña, passionately promoted her preferred
fix: comprehensive immigration reform legalizing a broad swath of the
undocumented population in the United States but barring all felons or
immigrants with three or more misdemeanors.
“You’d think there would be agreement. And there was. Bipartisan! We
were this close,” said an animated Saldaña. “If we could shout from the
mountaintops, or at least the hills of Austin and The Texas Tribune. I
guess this call has just fallen on deaf ears, and nobody is listening.
But how could I say what I said at that hearing where people would get
outraged? That we’re refusing to work on immigration reform?”
In the resulting congressional gridlock, neither vision — on the
lenient left or the deport-them-all right — has been implemented, so the
task of determining who stays and who goes falls to a patchwork of
local law enforcement agencies and their shaky partnership with federal
authorities.
Not surprisingly, Democrats and Republicans have wildly different
views about how to use law enforcement to achieve their immigration
goals. Even within the parties there are gaping divides. Despite the
GOP’s laser focus on enforcement and boots on the ground, when the
debate moves beyond the border and into the workplace, watch out:
Republicans are deeply divided.
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith,
R-San Antonio, has been promoting legislation since at least 2009 to
require all employers to use the E-Verify system to screen out illegal
workers from American jobs. But agriculture, retail, construction and
other business interests heavily dependent on undocumented labor have fought,
along with a coalition of liberal groups, to keep it off the floor of
the Republican-controlled House. Smith finally managed to get the bill out
of the House Judiciary Committee with the blessing of the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce in early 2015, but Republican House leaders haven’t let the
House vote on it.“There is kind of an odd bedfellows alliance on immigration that
really drives much of immigration politics, which is that you have
businesses that want cheap labor, and you have groups on the left ...
that want more warm bodies to speak for and represent,” said Mark
Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They really
do have a confluence of interest.”
The left is divided, too. While liberal activists in the state
capital fight to make Austin a sanctuary city and end detention
altogether for people caught crossing the border illegally, their
Democratic brethren who actually live in or represent the region don’t
complain much about ICE in the jails.
“I haven’t heard of anyone on the border that wants to have a sanctuary city,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar,
D-Laredo. “There are Democrats that want to have open borders ... I’m
certainly not in that camp. Then there’s other folks that feel we ought
to seal the borders and don’t let a single person in for any reason.
That’s wrong. The two camps are wrong.”
Since the immigration reform bill — which Cuellar supported — died
two and half years ago, the former customs broker has used his powerful
position on the House Appropriations Committee to advance incremental
steps he says will reduce the flow of people across the border and help
speed removal of criminal immigrants through badly clogged immigration
courts, where it sometimes takes years to resolve a case.
As part of the government funding deal struck in December, Cuellar,
working with Culberson on a key House Appropriations subcommittee,
helped snag funding for 55 new immigration judges — a 17 percent
increase — to begin clearing out the record backlog of nearly a half
million pending cases, which has swelled considerably with the recent
influx of Central Americans.
Cuellar also won approval, with an assist from U.S. Rep. Kay Granger,
R-Fort Worth, of nearly $1 billion in assistance for Mexico and Central
America — including $265 million for microloans to promote economic
development in areas from which immigrants are fleeing in droves toward
the U.S. border.
“I’d rather play defense on their 20-yard line than our 1-yard line,”
he said. “If you create a job over there, then there is less of a
reason why people come over here.”Julian Aguilar, Terri Langford, Morgan Smith, Alexa Ura and Neena Satija contributed to this report.

And the Hillary Clinton is really
flailing and looking for an opening. And the real opening, I think, is
the record of her life. Mistakes, excess baggage, all of it. But the
distrust question, truthfulness is killing her right now.”

because of character, to which he described has led to him as “clobbering her.” Bernstein said, “Well, I think it might not be wise if it literally
is to be more aggressive about Bernie Sanders. She is running a terribly
flawed campaign as a terribly flawed candidate. And she has got to find
her voice and get her record and her persona out there. It’s a great
record of a lifetime. He has put forth his character, his movement, and
it’s gotten traction. And he’s clobbering her. This is an election
between the two of them that really is about character and principle.
Obama just gave a great speech in which I would think he was saying to
both the Democrats and the Republicans, hey, calm down. Let’s have a
fact-based debate. And right now, Sanders has run a campaign that seems
to have captured the zeitgeist. And the Hillary Clinton is really
flailing and looking for an opening. And the real opening, I think, is
the record of her life. Mistakes, excess baggage, all of it. But the
distrust question, truthfulness is killing her right now.”

What if Sanders supporters see a crooked Clinton?

Hillary Clinton cares only about power, and she will do anything for power's sake.
Most of America already knew that ugly fact, but now, perhaps, the
leftists so in love with Bernie Sanders will begin to see this creepy crone as her true self: an amoral monster.The Clintons cheat. Sanders supporters seem to suspect that Clinton has cheated Sanders out of a victory in Iowa. Two
stories of delegate fraud by Clinton supporters against Sanders have
emerged in Iowa Precinct 43 and then in Ames District 1-3. Six times,
coin tosses decided how deadlocked precincts would go, and – surprise! –
Hillary won all six of the coin tosses. Given the microscopic lead
Clinton had in the Iowa caucus of 49.9% for Clinton and 49.6% for
Sanders, any fraud could have cost Sanders a victory, for which his
supporters had campaigned so hard.

So
all those voters who drove long hours in Iowa winter nights to hear
Sanders speak might have been cheated by corrupt party hacks controlled by the Clinton machine.

Donald Trump: More Criminal Illegal Aliens at Large in U.S. than Population of any City in New Hampshire

At Monday’s rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, GOP frontrunner
Donald Trump addressed the impact illegal immigration has had on
criminality throughout American communities and warned that there are
more criminal aliens at-large in the U.S. than the population of any
city in New Hampshire.

Trump told his Manchester audience:

Right now, as we speak … we have 179,000 illegal criminal
immigrants — illegal criminal — these are people that have been
convicted of crimes, some very big crimes. That means that we have
179,000 people here that have committed crimes that shouldn’t be crimes —
that shouldn’t be in the country … 179,000 people is bigger than any
city, by a lot, in New Hampshire. That’s a massive amount of people.

Indeed, a report
issued last week from the Senate Immigration Subcommittee found that
“fugitive criminal aliens outnumber populations of all New Hampshire
cities.”

For instance, the report notes that New Hampshire’s largest city,
Manchester — where Trump’s rally was held tonight — has a population
of around 110,000: “The number of at-large criminal aliens ordered
removed dwarfs the population [of Manchester] by nearly 70,000.”
The report states:

There are at least 179,027 aliens in the United States
who not only have been ordered to leave the country for violating our
immigration laws, but who have also been convicted of a criminal
offense, and have not left as required or been removed by ICE … While
the ICE data includes only criminal aliens who have already been ordered
removed, Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for
Immigration Studies, estimates there are more than 2 million total criminal aliens in the United States.

Trump continued, explaining to his New Hampshire audience:

We either have a country, folks, or we don’t. Remember
this: we either have a country or we don’t. So we’re going to have to
take people, we’re going to get rid of those 179 [thousand]. And I don’t
want to put them in our jails… Our jails are costing us a fortune…
We’re bringing them back where they came from, and let that country put
them in prison for the next 25 years, because we’re not doing it. And
they’re never, ever coming back to our country again. They are gone.
Never.”

In contrast to Trump’s pledge to deport those residing in the country illegally,

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)

79%

co-authored and championed an immigration bill, which, according to
immigration law enforcement, would “provide instant legalization and a
path to citizenship to gang members and other dangerous criminal
aliens.”
At the time, ICE Union president Chris Crane said that Rubio
“directly misled law enforcement.” As Stephen Miller — Trump’s Senior
Policy Adviser and former communications director for

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

80%

— recently told Breitbart News Daily, Rubio watched on
as Chuck Schumer allowed Capitol Hill security to remove Crane from the
Gang of Eight press conference. Miller said that Crane was removed
simply “for having the temerity to ask a question” on behalf of law
enforcement after Rubio had broken his promises.
Breitbart News has previously reported how Rubio continues
to support all of the substantive policies outlined in his Gang of Eight
bill — including the controversial aspect of the bill
which would have allowed convicted criminal aliens, such as sex
offenders and gang members, to remain in the United States and become
U.S. citizens.

"Criminal Aliens" Flashpoint of Border Security Debate

A group of undocumented Mexican national
ex-offenders enter Mexico at the US-Mexico border crossing at
Brownsville/Matamoros after being deported from the United States on
Nov. 4, 2015.

The
Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border
security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around
these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.

Juan Francisco de Luna Vasquez passed through the Webb County jail at
least four times on more than a half dozen charges before allegedly
beating his wife to death with a hammer last year in Laredo.Victor Reyes had already spent three months in the Hidalgo County Jail, four
months in state custody and six years in federal prison for multiple
felony offenses by the time he went on a random shooting spree in
Houston, killing two people and injuring three more in January 2015.
And before Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly shot Kate Steinle
to death on Pier 14 in San Francisco last summer, authorities say he had
racked up a criminal record including seven felonies, mostly drug
related, and a 1997 arrest for assault.
There are peculiarities to each case, but they have something in
common: all three men were thrown out of the country multiple times by
federal immigration authorities but returned illegally — through the
Texas-Mexico border — before committing new crimes in the United States,
records obtained by The Texas Tribune show.
Their crimes put them at the center of a red-hot political debate
about illegal immigration, the revolving door at the southern border and
controversial immigrant catch-and-release policies that pit
deportation-fixated conservatives against liberal immigrant advocates.
How to deal with, or talk about, foreigners who commit crimes in the
United States — the government’s term for them is the politically
incorrect “criminal aliens” — has laid bare a bitter divide in the
electorate and has prompted heated calls for vastly different solutions.
A Texas Tribune analysis found that undocumented immigrants make up a
smaller share of those imprisoned in Texas — including on Death Row —
than of the general population. However, a veil of government secrecy
and inconsistent record-keeping make it difficult to accurately
determine how many criminal immigrants are in the country or how many
crimes they have committed. Fear, outrage and political jockeying have
largely filled the information void.

“This
is an issue that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work
on it because we're so busy pointing fingers at each other.”— Sarah Saldaña, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Billionaire Donald Trump kicked off his smash-talking presidential
campaign last year with criminal immigrants in his crosshairs, saying
Mexico was sending its “rapists” and drug dealers to the United States and promising to build a gigantic border wall to keep them out.
Closer to home, liberal activists in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas are pressuring
local law enforcement officials to build a different kind of wall —
procedural barricades to block local officials from cooperating and
coordinating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove
people.
Their concern: In the rush to deport unwanted criminals from the
ranks of the undocumented, a lot of otherwise hard-working and
law-abiding foreign nationals are caught up in the dragnet — people like
Raul Zamora, a
University of Texas student who found himself facing removal after
getting pulled over for a broken tail-light. Or Max Villaroto, a popular
Iowa pastor deported last summer
for minor crimes (DWI and using fraudulent documents) committed in the
late 1990s. Civil liberties organizations also argue that federal
authorities are violating the constitutional rights of some inmates, and
in some cases those groups have successfully sued jails that hand inmates over to federal authorities.
No one is more aware of the schizophrenic impulses in immigration
policy than Sarah Saldaña, the Texas-born director of ICE, which has a
$6 billion budget and 20,000 employees spread across all 50 states and
several dozen foreign countries. Many Democrats think she’s “heartless”
when it comes to deporting and detaining immigrants, as one Democratic
Congressional aide put it. Republicans think she’s not tough enough.
“What we're doing now is not satisfying to anybody — the left or the
right,” Saldaña told The Texas Tribune in December. “This is an issue
that tears this country apart, and we’re refusing to work on it because
we're so busy pointing fingers at each other."Slipping through the cracks
The political focus on criminal immigrants flows directly from
official U.S. policy: Terrorists and public safety threats are the top
priorities of the nation’s border security and immigration enforcement
apparatus. President Obama famously said
in 2014 that he wants to deport “felons, not families.” ICE insists it
focuses on removing the “worst of the worst.” Even immigration
hard-liners who say they want to deport everyone here illegally agree
the bad guys should go first.
The problem is that criminals take advantage of the same porous
border as otherwise law-abiding job seekers. And if they are apprehended
in this country, sometimes they are set free by ICE or an immigration
judge. Other times, they slip through the cracks of systematic
communication breakdowns among local, state and federal law enforcement.
Some of them end up committing more crimes.
In the late 1990s, infamous “railway killer”
Rafael Resendez-Ramirez took advantage of the leaky border and law
enforcement failures to repeatedly elude authorities, often using fake
names, even though he was wanted by the FBI, was a suspect in several
murders and had criminal records in at least seven states.
A damning federal report in 2000 highlighted poor training and interbureaucratic fumbling
behind the decision giving Resendez a “voluntary return” to his native
Mexico, for the eighth time, in the summer of 1999. He came back to the
United States almost immediately and killed four more people over two
weeks.

photo by: Justin Dehn

Juan Leonardo Quintero, an undocumented
immigrant pictured here in 2015 in a visitation booth at the
maximum-security Allred Unit near Wichita Falls, is serving a life
sentence for the 2006 murder of Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson.

Fallout from the case helped prompt reforms and better sharing of
criminal databases among law enforcement agencies, but weaknesses
endured. That became clear a few months after Resendez was put to death
by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, in 2006, when Juan Leonardo
Quintero, a deported sex offender with multiple previous criminal
convictions, shot and killed Houston Police Officer Rodney Johnson in
the back of his patrol car.
His case, like Resendez’s, sparked a series of reforms. The Texas
Department of Public Safety had removed Quintero and more than 2,000
other sex offenders from its public registry, though not from the
criminal database law enforcement uses internally, after they were
deported — despite the possibility of their return to Texas. That
practice stopped after Johnson’s murder.After the high-profile murder, the
city of Houston also changed its policy to allow more police cooperation
with ICE to ensure that wanted criminal immigrants are handed over to
federal authorities, recalls Robert Rutt, the agency’s special agent in
charge at the time of the incident.
“It took the tragedy of Rodney Johnson being killed,” Rutt said.Sanctuary cities
In spite of piecemeal reforms over the years at the federal and local
level, significant lapses remain — and seemingly avoidable tragedies
pile up.
Kate Steinle was shot dead in San Francisco just weeks after her
alleged murderer was released from jail by local authorities who
rebuffed a request from federal immigration authorities to notify them
before his release.
San Francisco is among so-called “sanctuary cities” that limit or, in
some cases, forbid local police and jailers from cooperating with ICE
to catch and detain immigrants sought by the agency.
In the Steinle case, the agency wanted to take custody of
undocumented immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez after authorities in
San Francisco apprehended and processed him on an outstanding warrant.
But under its policy
of noncooperation with federal authorities on immigration matters, the
jail released him without notifying ICE. Officials in California said if
the agency wanted Lopez-Sanchez, it could have used its power to seek a
court order to hold him.
Several years earlier in Chicago, similar “sanctuary” policies allowed Kenyan-born gang leader Mwenda Murithi to stay off ICE’s radar
despite 26 arrests and four felony convictions. After he got out of
jail in 2007, Murithi ordered a gang hit that led to the death of a
13-year-old girl who was caught in the crossfire. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison.
This deliberate disconnect between local authorities and ICE — a
chief reason certain local jurisdictions get the “sanctuary city” label —
ranks as one of the major ways
immigrants slip through the hands of law enforcement, according to
agency data obtained by The Texas Tribune under the Freedom of
Information Act.
The federal records show local law enforcement agencies around
the country declined to honor more than 18,000 “detainer” requests from
ICE — a process used when the agency seeks custody of non-citizens in
local or state jails — from Jan. 1, 2014 to September of last year.
Two-thirds of them had criminal records, the records show.

Generally speaking, when local officials don't honor a detainer, a
foreign national wanted by federal authorities is released from a jail
after an arrest or conviction. Some later get picked up by ICE for
possible deportation. Some don’t.
Almost 60 percent of the refused detainers nationwide were logged in California. According to an internal ICE memo,
obtained last year by the conservative Center for Immigration Studies,
which vigorously opposes illegal immigration, 27 percent of the declined
detainers in the first eight months of 2014 were associated with
individuals who, soon after getting out of jail, allegedly went on to
commit new crimes.
Most of the details of those alleged crimes were deemed confidential,
and that part of the memo was blacked out. Not redacted: six incidents
of recidivism that the agency considered “particularly high profile”
over the eight-month period — five in California and one in Florida.
Among the foreign nationals in California who were let go and quickly
got in trouble again: a sex offender in San Mateo County with a prior
DUI who allegedly went on to sexually assault a victim under the age of
10; a Santa Clara County resident with “nine previous convictions
(including seven felonies);” and a robbery suspect who got out of jail
and was soon arrested on a rape charge.
Then there was this description in the ICE report: “On April 6, 2014,
Los Angeles, California law enforcement arrested an individual for
felony continuous sexual abuse of a child. Despite the severity of that
charge, local law enforcement did not honor an immigration detainer ICE
issued for the individual. After local law enforcement declined the
detainer, the individual was arrested for felony sodomy of a victim
under 10 years old.”
Texas accounts for a miniscule fraction of the declined detainers —
less than one percent— making it the most ICE-friendly large state in
the country. But Dallas and Travis Counties have “come onto the radar”
of ICE officials due to the pressure that activists are exerting on
officials there, agency Director Saldaña recently told the Tribune.

Dallas — which has been sued at least twice over its cooperation with
federal authorities — is the only county in Texas listed by ICE as
having a policy that limits cooperation with the agency, though the
sheriff’s office there says it has yet to decline a detainer request.
One reason Dallas County has been taken to court is the allegation that
it honored a federal detainer that ICE placed, in violation of the
Constitution, on a U.S. citizen.
Travis County, a rare Democratic stronghold in an otherwise red
state, logged half of the rejected detainers in Texas, with 72, between
Jan. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2015, according to the data obtained by the
Tribune.
The way some outspoken activists and elected officials see it, that
number should be far higher. All four of the candidates in the March 1
Democratic primary to replace outgoing Travis County Sheriff Greg
Hamilton — a Democrat who works closely with ICE despite immense
pressure to stop — want to end cooperation
with the agency when it issues detainers for non-citizen inmates. The
Travis County Democratic Party and Austin City Council have also gone on
record in the last couple of years calling for a break-up in the
local-federal marriage.
“There’s a very good chance that our next sheriff may very well
disentangle our relationship between local law enforcement and
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” said Austin City Councilman
Gregorio Casar. “I don’t think we should be complying (with ICE
detainers).”
Casar rejects the notion that telling ICE to take a hike amounts to
being “soft on the law.” Instead, he said families will feel safe — and
more inclined to cooperate with the police — if they know they don’t
risk deportation when they get in trouble locally.
Representing a heavily immigrant district — he’s the son of Mexican
immigrants himself — Casar said conservative politicians use anecdotal
evidence of crimes committed by immigrants to tar an entire population,
“using xenophobia or fear or stereotyping of others as a way to move
somebody’s political agenda forward.”
His argument points to another major flashpoint in the debate about
immigrants who commit crimes — namely, how to measure the problem.
Liberals and conservatives generally point to statistics that bolster
their particular ideological views, yet virtually every data set
contains flaws and caveats. Hiding the numbers
Woefully incomplete record-keeping and intentional secrecy top the
list of reasons why it's difficult to measure crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants. During booking, local jails — in Texas and
beyond — often don’t ask who’s a citizen and who isn’t. They’re supposed
to determine whether an inmate is “foreign born,” but since that
designation can include people here legally — everyone from agricultural
guest workers to naturalized U.S. citizens — the data generally can’t
be used to track crimes by those here illegally.
On the federal side, the institutional secrecy inside ICE makes it
difficult to obtain or analyze how the government is handling
undocumented criminal offenders — or, for that matter, whether
non-criminal immigrants are being treated fairly in detention. Although
the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was written only to protect citizens and
lawful U.S. residents, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE by
extension have adopted rules applying it to undocumented immigrants,
including those with criminal records. In practice, ICE provides
detailed immigration histories of “criminal aliens” only when it chooses
to — as it often does after high-profile cases that spark local
outrage.
For example, the agency quickly provided the extensive immigration
history of Steinle’s alleged murderer after the fact, as it did in 2011
when Kevin Will became the fourth
Houston police officer since 2005 to be killed or seriously injured by
an undocumented immigrant previously removed from the United States. But
ICE cites Privacy Act protections when citizens or the news media asks
for lists of, say, multiple deportees with criminal records who have
been released into a particular community — information that might point
to a fixable glitch or policy shortcoming.
A federal judge on the East Coast triggered a rare burst of transparency
from the secretive agency when she ruled in 2013 that ICE had to
provide the names of thousands of violent offenders to the Boston Globe
after a two-year legal battle. But today the agency considers that a
one-off decision that applied only to the Globe’s request and has thus
far refused to give the Tribune or other news outlets identifying
information about any significant slice of the immigrant population it
detains, deports or releases — including those with violent histories.
ICE even turned down the Tribune’s request for the immigration
histories of nine of the state’s 12 undocumented death row inmates. The
agency voluntarily provided the information on three of them, but its
Freedom of Information Act Office said it would need the other condemned
prisoners to agree in writing before giving out details of their
encounters with the U.S. Border Patrol or ICE, including any
deportations.
“Please be advised that DHS regulations require, in the case of third
party information requests, a statement from the individual verifying
his or her identity and certifying that individual's agreement that
records concerning him or her may be accessed, analyzed and released to a
third party,” ICE said in an email to the Tribune.
ICE officials did help identify the 12 inmates currently on Texas
death row who were here illegally at the time they committed their
crimes. That made it possible to determine whether undocumented
immigrants are under- or over-represented. They make up about 4.7
percent of those awaiting execution — less than the 6.3 percent of the
Texas population believed to be undocumented.

“I see more local U.S. citizens coming through the revolving door than I do immigrants.”— Ponce Coy Trevino, commander of the Webb County Jail in Laredo

Similarly, The Texas Tribune analyzed Texas prison data and found no
evidence to suggest that undocumented immigrants are convicted of state
crimes at higher rates than the native-born. In fact, inside the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice, the Tribune estimates that undocumented
immigrants known to be wanted by ICE make up about 4.6 percent of the
total inmate population. As with the death row figures, the evidence
suggests that people here illegally at the time they committed crimes
are under-represented in state prison when compared to the total number
of undocumented immigrants believed to be living in Texas.
County jail data in Texas is harder to analyze, but anecdotally, a
similar picture emerges — even along the southern border that so many
immigrants cross.
“I see more local U.S. citizens coming through the revolving door
than I do immigrants,” said Ponce Coy Trevino, commander of the Webb
County Jail in Laredo, which sits right on the Texas-Mexico border.
“Every once in a while ... I’ll see a certain person and think, ‘Hey,
didn’t he get deported?’ And he comes back in. But I see more of the
local U.S. citizens.”
No matter what the rate, many in Congress say crimes committed by
undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be happening at all, particularly when
perpetrated by people with long criminal records who have been deported
multiple times — the “worst of the worst” that ICE considers to be its
top priorities for removal.
“The saddest thing is it’s preventable,” said U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul,
R-Austin, a former federal prosecutor who oversees much of the federal
immigration and border enforcement activity as chairman of the U.S.
House Homeland Security Committee. “If [local law enforcement] would
honor the ICE detainer, if we could get that border secure, we could
stop this.”Federal detainees also released
Sanctuary city policies — whether intentional or prompted by lawsuits
— are not the only way immigrants with criminal histories get out of
law enforcement custody. While ICE chafes when county jails release
immigrant criminals onto the streets, some sheriffs point out that the
federal agency itself lets thousands go, too. This often happens without
ICE telling local authorities when or where it’s happening, though the
agency says it’s beefing up efforts to notify states when criminals are
released in various jurisdictions.
Over the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, ICE released 66,565 “criminal
aliens” from its custody, according to agency figures. A state-by-state
breakdown provided to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee shows
that 11,219 of them were released in Texas.
Sometimes, they offend again. According to ICE figures provided to
the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1,000 of the immigrants released from
federal custody in 2013 were convicted
of later crimes, and 121 immigrants let go during removal proceedings
between 2010 and 2014 were subsequently charged with homicide-related
offenses.
There are three main routes out the door of federal immigration detention.
In many cases, ICE uses its own discretion to release immigrants with
criminal histories — as it did 57 percent of the time in fiscal 2014.
Some are supervised or monitored, and some are not. The releases have
sparked blowback in Congress, and last March the agency announced tighter
procedures for non-mandatory releases, particularly for violent
offenders. In December, Saldaña said discretionary releases have gone
down in 2015, but the agency has yet to release the figures.
In other cases, ICE has no choice but to release a detained foreign
national if ordered to by an immigration judge from the U.S. Department
of Justice. In 2014, 35 percent of those released fell into this
category.
Then there’s the so-called “Zadvydas” releases, which
accounted for eight percent of the total releases in fiscal 2014,
figures provided to Congress show. Those occur when immigrants can’t be
deported, typically because their home country refuses to take them back
or there’s a problem processing travel documents.
The name comes from U.S. Supreme Court case Zadvydas v. Davis, a 5-4 decision that
ICE can’t hold a noncitizen criminal indefinitely; unless deportation
is reasonably imminent, the cutoff is six months. Since the ruling came
out in 2001, thousands of criminally convicted immigrants with final
removal orders — about 6,000 in the 2013 and 2014 fiscal years alone —
have been let go. This was the category of release the Boston Globe,
which only got detailed information after suing the agency, wrote about
in 2012. Globe reporter Maria Sacchetti described several chilling
crimes by un-deportable foreigners and reported that ICE “routinely
releases dangerous detainees to the streets of America without warning
the public.”
Both Republican and Democratic administrations have repeatedly ignored or otherwise failed to use the considerable power
Congress gave the executive branch to pressure foreign governments by
denying U.S. visas to their citizens. Years after the landmark Boston
Globe report came out, there remains just a single instance in which it
was used — when the tiny South American nation of Guyana refused to take
back convicts, officials say. (Cuba, China, Vietnam and India are among
the habitual decliners, according to ICE figures and congressional
testimony).
A 2004 audit
by the Government Accountability Office noted that two months after the
United States suspended visas to citizens of Guyana in 2001, the country
“issued travel documents to 112 of the 113 Guyanese aliens who had been
order removed from the United States.” Auditors also found overwhelmed
ICE officials were failing to oversee released immigrants they were
supposed to be keeping an eye on.
U.S. Rep. John Culberson,
R-Houston, said the U.S. government should have done the same thing it
did to Guyana when another tiny country — Haiti — refused to take back
convicted immigrant Jean Jacques, a Haitian convict who was released
under the Zadvydas ruling and now stands accused of murder in the 2015 stabbing death of Casey Chadwick in Connecticut.
“If someone is in the country illegally, and we try to send them back
to their home country, and their home country refuses it, we not only
ought to cut off visas to their government officials, but frankly cut
off foreign aid, cut off economic assistance,” Culberson said.Gridlock blocks reform
If Culberson's insistence sounds like a partisan screed from a conservative Texas Republican (and a supporter of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz,
an immigration hard-liner, for president), consider this: Democratic
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Hillary Clinton supporter, said as much
to Saldaña, Obama’s ICE director, at a contentious December Senate
hearing focusing on the administration’s “criminal alien removal
policies.”

photo by: Allison Shelley

Sarah R. Saldaña, director of U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at ICE headquarters in Washington,
D.C., on Dec. 9, 2015.

Yet, despite evidence of bipartisan agreement on punishing foreign
countries that don’t take their nationals back — an effort that in 2012
briefly brought together the likes of conservative U.S. Rep. Ted Poe,
R-Humble, and liberal California U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren — proposals to
curtail the practice have stalled out like so many other immigration and
border security fixes.
Cruz used the same recent Senate hearing to promote his own vision
for solving the problem of repeat border-crossers who commit crimes: a
mandatory minimum sentence of five years for anyone caught re-entering
the country illegally after deportation, a bill supporters call “Kate’s
Law,” in memory of Kate Steinle.
Saldaña pointed to prison overcrowding, which recently prompted one of the largest releases of federal inmates in U.S. history, in expressing opposition to the measure, which Senate Democrats ended up blocking.
“Last time I checked, there was very close to a majority of illegal
aliens in our current prisons, and I think you are very much aware of
the state of our current prisons and the fact that they’re busting at
the seams,” Saldaña told Cruz. “I do not believe that increasing the
minimum penalty is going to be the most effective thing.”
ICE officials were unable to say what statistics Saldaña was
referencing. Noncitizens — not necessarily undocumented ones — make up
about a quarter, not half, of the federal prison population, says
the U.S. Sentencing Commission. When it comes to federal arrests,
noncitizens made up just under half of the total in 2010, largely due to
an explosion of prosecutions for illegal entry, rather than for violent
acts, according to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service.
During the hearing and later, in an interview with the Tribune,
Saldaña, a Corpus Christi native and sister of Nueces County State
District Judge Marisela Saldaña, passionately promoted her preferred
fix: comprehensive immigration reform legalizing a broad swath of the
undocumented population in the United States but barring all felons or
immigrants with three or more misdemeanors.
“You’d think there would be agreement. And there was. Bipartisan! We
were this close,” said an animated Saldaña. “If we could shout from the
mountaintops, or at least the hills of Austin and The Texas Tribune. I
guess this call has just fallen on deaf ears, and nobody is listening.
But how could I say what I said at that hearing where people would get
outraged? That we’re refusing to work on immigration reform?”
In the resulting congressional gridlock, neither vision — on the
lenient left or the deport-them-all right — has been implemented, so the
task of determining who stays and who goes falls to a patchwork of
local law enforcement agencies and their shaky partnership with federal
authorities.
Not surprisingly, Democrats and Republicans have wildly different
views about how to use law enforcement to achieve their immigration
goals. Even within the parties there are gaping divides. Despite the
GOP’s laser focus on enforcement and boots on the ground, when the
debate moves beyond the border and into the workplace, watch out:
Republicans are deeply divided.
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith,
R-San Antonio, has been promoting legislation since at least 2009 to
require all employers to use the E-Verify system to screen out illegal
workers from American jobs. But agriculture, retail, construction and
other business interests heavily dependent on undocumented labor have fought,
along with a coalition of liberal groups, to keep it off the floor of
the Republican-controlled House. Smith finally managed to get the bill out
of the House Judiciary Committee with the blessing of the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce in early 2015, but Republican House leaders haven’t let the
House vote on it.“There is kind of an odd bedfellows alliance on immigration that
really drives much of immigration politics, which is that you have
businesses that want cheap labor, and you have groups on the left ...
that want more warm bodies to speak for and represent,” said Mark
Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They really
do have a confluence of interest.”
The left is divided, too. While liberal activists in the state
capital fight to make Austin a sanctuary city and end detention
altogether for people caught crossing the border illegally, their
Democratic brethren who actually live in or represent the region don’t
complain much about ICE in the jails.
“I haven’t heard of anyone on the border that wants to have a sanctuary city,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar,
D-Laredo. “There are Democrats that want to have open borders ... I’m
certainly not in that camp. Then there’s other folks that feel we ought
to seal the borders and don’t let a single person in for any reason.
That’s wrong. The two camps are wrong.”
Since the immigration reform bill — which Cuellar supported — died
two and half years ago, the former customs broker has used his powerful
position on the House Appropriations Committee to advance incremental
steps he says will reduce the flow of people across the border and help
speed removal of criminal immigrants through badly clogged immigration
courts, where it sometimes takes years to resolve a case.
As part of the government funding deal struck in December, Cuellar,
working with Culberson on a key House Appropriations subcommittee,
helped snag funding for 55 new immigration judges — a 17 percent
increase — to begin clearing out the record backlog of nearly a half
million pending cases, which has swelled considerably with the recent
influx of Central Americans.
Cuellar also won approval, with an assist from U.S. Rep. Kay Granger,
R-Fort Worth, of nearly $1 billion in assistance for Mexico and Central
America — including $265 million for microloans to promote economic
development in areas from which immigrants are fleeing in droves toward
the U.S. border.
“I’d rather play defense on their 20-yard line than our 1-yard line,”
he said. “If you create a job over there, then there is less of a
reason why people come over here.”Julian Aguilar, Terri Langford, Morgan Smith, Alexa Ura and Neena Satija contributed to this report.